Aus:
THE
ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
ELEVENTH EDITION
New York 1911
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SONNET (Ital.
Sonetto, dim. of Suono, Fr. Sonnet). The sonnet in the literature of modern Europe is a brief
poetic form of fourteen rhymed verses, ranged according to prescription.
Although in a language like the English it does no doubt require considerable
ingenuity to construct a satisfactory sonnet of octave and sestet running
upon four rhymes, this ingenuity is only a mens to an end, the end being
properly that a single wave of emotion, when emotion is either too deeply
charged with thought, or too much adulterated with fancy, to pass
spontaneously into the movements of pure lyric, shall be embodied in a single
metrical flow and return. Whether any given sonnet be composed like that of
Pier delle Vingne (of two quartrains with rhymes running a, b, a, b, a, b, a,
b, and of two tercets with rhymes running, c, d, e, c, d, e,), or whether the
verses be arranged (on the authority of Shakespeare
and Drayton) in three quartrains of alternate rhymes clinched by a couplet,
or, as in the sonnet of Petrarch, in an octave of two rhymes and a sestet of
either two or three rhimes-in each case the peculiar pleasure which the ear
derives from the sonnet as a metrical form lies in the number and arrangement
of the verses being prescribed, and distinctly recognized form is born of a
natural and universal instinct is perhaps evidenced by the fact that, even
when a metrical arrangement discloses no structural law demanding a
prescriptive number and arrangement of verses, the poet will nevertheless, in
certain moods, choose to restrict himself to a prescribed number and
arrangement, an in the cases of the Italian stornello, the Welsh triban, and
the beautiful rhymeless short ode of Japanese poetry. And perhaps, if we
probed the matter deeply, we should find that the recognized precription of
form gives a sense of oneness that nothing else save the refrain can give to
a poem which, being at once too long for a stanza in a series and too short
to have the self-sustaining power of the more extended kinds of poetic art,
suffers by suggesting to the ear a sense of the fragmentary and the inchoate.
It is not then merely the number of the verses, it is also their arrangement
as to rhymes – an arrangement leading the ear to expect a prescribed sequence
and then satisfying that expectation – which entitles a form of fourteen
verses to be called a sonnet.
Hence the so-called irregular sonnets of S. T. Coleridge,
which lead the ear of the reader to expect the pleasure of a prescribed
arrangement when what they have to offer is a pleasure of an exactly opposite
kind – the pleasure of an absolute freedom from prescribed arrangement – are
unsatisfactory, while (as the present writer has often pointed out) the same
poet’s fourteen-line poem, “Work without Hope,” in which the reader expects
and gets freedom from prescription, is entirely satisfactory. This same
little poem of Coleridge’s also affords an excellent illustration of another
point in connexion with the sonnet. If we trace the history and the
development of the sonnet from Pier delle Vigne to D. G. Rossetti
we shall find that the poet’s quest from the very first has been to write a
poem in fourteen verses so arranged that they should, better than any other
number and arrangement of verses, produce a certain melodic effect upon the
ear, and an effect, moreover, that should bear iteration and reiteration in
other poems similarly constructed. Now if we ask ourselves whether, beautiful
as is this poem, “Work without Hope,” taken as a single and original metrical
arrangement, we should get out of a series of poems modelled line for line
upon it that pleasure of iteration which we get out of a series of Petrarchan
sonnets, we shall easily see why the regular sonnet of octave and sestet on
the one hand, and what is called the Shakespearean sonnet on the other, have
survived all other competing forms.
In modern Europe the sonnet has always had a peculiar fascination for
poets of the first class-poets, that is, in whom poetic energy and plastic
power are equally combined. It would seem that the very fact that the sonnet
is a recognized structure suggestive of mere art - suggestive in some
measure, indeed, of what Schiller would call “sport” in art – has drawn some
of the most passionate poets in the world to the sonnet as the medium of
their sincerest utterances. Without being coldly artifical, like the rondeau,
the sestina, the ballade, the villanelle, &c., the sonnet is yet so
artistic in structure, its form is so universally known, recognized, and adopted as being artistic,
that the too fervid spontaneity and reality of the poet’s emotion may be in a
certain degree veiled, and the poet can whisper,
as from behind a mask, those deepest secrets of the heart which could
otherwise only find expression in purely dramatic forms.
That the sonnet was invented, not in Provence, as French critics
pretend, but in Italy in the 13th century, is pretty clear, but by
whom is still perhaps an open question. S. Waddington and serval other
critics have attributed to Fra Guittone the hohor of having invented the
form. But J. A. Symonds has reminded us that the sonnet beginning Pero’ ch’
amore, attributed to Pier delle Vigne, secretary of state in the Sicilian
court of Frederick, has claims which no student of early Italian poetry can
ignore.
As regards English sonnets, whether the Petrarchan and the
Shakespearean are really the best of all possible forms we need not inquire.
But inasmuch as they have become so vital and so dominant over other sonnet
forms that whenever we begin to read the first verse of an English sonnet we
expect to find one or other of these recognized rhyme-arrangements, any
departure from these two arrangements, even though the result be such a
magnificent poem as Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” dissapoints the
expectation, baffles the ear, and brings with it that sense of the
fragmentary and the inchoate to which we have before alluded. If however,
some writer should arise with sufficient originality of metrical endowment
and sufficient poetic power to do what Keats,
in a famous experiment of his, tried to do and failed – impress the public
ear with a new sonnet structure, impress the public ear so powerfully that a
new kind of expectance is created the moment the first verse of a sonnet is
recited – then there will be three kinds of English sonnets instead of two.
With regard to the Petrarchan sonnet, all critics are perhaps now
agreed that, while the form of the octave is invariable, the form of the
sestet is absolutely free, save that the emotions should govern the arrangement
of the verses. But as regards the division between octave and sestet, Mark
Pattison says, with great boldness, but perhaps with truth, that by blending
octave with sestet Milton missed the very object and end of the Petrarchan
scheme. |
Another critic, however, Hall Caine,
contends that by making “octave flow into sestet without break of musik or
thought” Milton consciously or unconsciously invented a new form of sonnet; that
is so say, Milton, in his use of the Petrarchan octave and sestet for the
embodiment of intellectual substance incapable of that partial disintegration
which Petrarch himself always or mostly sought, invented a species of sonnet
which is English in impetus, but Italian, or partially Italian, in structure.
Hence this critic, like William Sharp, divides all English sonnets into four
groups: (1) sonnets of Shakespearean structure; (2) sonnets of octave and
sestet of Miltonic structure; (3) sonnets of contemporary structure, i. e.
all sonnets on the Petrarchian model in which the metrical and intellectual
“wave and flow and ebb” (as originally formutated by the present writer in a
sonnet on the sonnet, which has appeared in most of the recent anthologies) is
strictly observed, and in which, while the rhyme-arrangement of the octave is
invariable. that of the sestet is free; (4) sonnets of miscellaneous
structure.
With regard to what is called the contemporary form – a Petrarchan
arrangement with the sestet divided very sharply from the octave – the
crowning difficultly and the crowning triuph of the sonnet writer has always
been to so handle the rhythm of the prescribed structure as to make it seem
in each individual sonnet the inevitable and natural rhythm demanded by the
emotion which gives the individual sonnet birth, and this can perhaps only be
archieved when the richness and apparent complexity of the rhyme-arrangement
is balanced by that perfect lucidity and simplicity of syntax which is the
special quest of the “sonnet of flow and ebb”
The wave theory has found acceptance with such studets of the sonnet as Rossetti
and Mark Pattison, J. A. Symonds, Hall Caine, and William Sharp. Symonds,
indeed, seems to hint that the very name given by the Italians to the two
tercets, the volta or turn, indicates the metrical meaning of the form. “The
striking metaphorical symbol,” says he, “drawn from the observation of the
swelling and declining wave can even in some examples be applied to sonnets
on the Shakespearean model; for, as a wave may fall gradually or abruptly, so
the sonnet may sink with stately volume or with oprecipitate subsidence to
its close. Rossetti furnishes incomparable examples of the former and more
desirable conclusion; Sydney Dobell, in ‘Home in War Time,’ yields an extreme
specimen of the latter.”
And now as to the Shakespearean sonnet. Some very acute critics have
spoken as if this form were merely a lawless succesion of three quartrains
clinched by a couplet, and as if the number of the quartrains might just as
well have been two or four as the present prescribed number of three. If this
were so, it wozuld unquestionably be a serious in peachment of the
Shakespearean sonnet, for, save in the poetry of ingenuity, no metric
arrangement is otherwise than bad unless it be the result of a deep metrical
necessity.
If the prescriptive arrangement of three quartrains cliched by a
couplet is not a metrical necessizy, if it is not demanded in order to prevent
the couplet from losing its power, such an arrangement is idle and worse than
idle; just as in the case of the Petrarchian sonnet, if it can be shown that
the solid unity of the outflowing wave can be maintained as copmpletely upon
three rhymes as upon two, then the restriction of the octave two rhymes is
simple pedantry. But he who would test the metrical necessity of the
arrangement in the Shakespearean sonnet has only to make the experiment of
writing a poem of two quartrains with a couplet, and then another poem of
four quartrains with a couplet, in order to see how inevitable is the
metrical necessity of the Shakespearean number and arrangement for the
achievement of the metrical effect which Shakespeare, Drayton and
others sought. While in the poem of two quartrains the expected couplet has
the sharp epigrammatic effect of the couplet in ordinary stanzas (such as
that of ottava rima, and as that of the “Venus and Adonis” stanza),
destroying that pensive sweetness which is the characteristic of the
Shakespearean sonnet, the poem of four quartrains is just sufficiently long
for the expected pleasure of the couplet to be dispersed and wasted.
The quest of the Shakespearean sonnet is not, like that of the sonnet
of octave and sestet, sonority, and, so to speak, metrical counterpoint, but
sweetness; and the sweetest of all possible arrangements in English
versification is a succession of decasyllabic quartrains in alternate rhymes
knit together and clinched by a couplet – a couplet coming not so far from
the initial verse as to lose its binding power, and yet not so near the
initial verse that the ring of epigram disturbs the “linked sweetness long
drawn out” of this movement, but sufficiently near to shed its influence over
the poem back to the initial verse. A chief part of the pleasure of the
Shakespearean sonnet is the expectance of the climecteric rest of the couplet
at the end (just as a chief part of the pleasure of the sonnet of octave and
sestet is the expectance of the
answering ebb of the sestet when the close of the octave has been reached);
and this expectance is gratified too early if it comes after two quartrains,
while if it comes after a greater number of quartrains than three it is
dispersed and wasted altogether.
The French sonnet has a regular Petrarchan octave with a sestet of
three rhymes beginning with a couplet. The Spanish sonnet is also based on
the pure Italian type, and is extremely graceful and airy. The same may be
said of the Portuguese sonnet – a form of which the illustrious Camoens has left nearly tree hundred exemplares. (T. W.-D.)
See also English Literature: 3. Elisabethan; Sidney Lee on the
Elisabethan sonnet in Arber’s English Garner (1904); J. A. Noble, The
Sonnet in England (1893); m. Jasinski, Historie du sonnet en
France (1903); C. A. Lentzner, Das Sonett in d. eng. Dichtkunst bis Milton
(1886); S. Waddington, English Sonnets by Living Writers (1881), and Sonnets
of Europe (1886); T. Hall Caine, Sonnets of Three Centuries (1882);
William Sharp, Sonnets of this Century (1886), and American Sonnets
(1889); John Dennis, English Sonnets (1873). |